I'm about a day away from my 50k pageviews.
If you capture it let me know and I'll do up a pretty picture for you!

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ps. my website is up if you haven't seen it yet [link]

So I suck at making journal posts here since I've been updating my livejournal.
It's been exactly a year since my last journal. I know this cause the last one was a birthday post and it's my birthday again.
This april I graduate. I plan to do a full on overhaul of all my online sources. Rework some old pieces, clean up my gallery, etc.
Till then I probably won't do much journal posting. Some new art certainly so keep an eye out for those!

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ps. my website is up if you haven't seen it yet [link]

Current Quote:
"If I understood what was going on it wouldn't be HALF as fun!"



It's my birthday today!
In an attempt to steal some of my gifts it appears the easter bunny and jesus have conspired to move easter early this year. Needless to say I will be keeping an eye out around my presents for any large bunnies or men in robes today.

For those interested in numbers, I'm 26

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ps. my website is up if you haven't seen it yet [link]

Current Quote:
"If I understood what was going on it wouldn't be HALF as fun!"



So I've been sitting on this information for a while now, afraid that if I said anything out loud that the earth might open up and swallow me whole. But as all my forms have been signed, and no one has mentioned it wouldn't be ok for me to talk about it, I think it's ok for me to say now.

This summer my illustration program has a co-op (internship) that we each had to find a position for. And I was able to secure a position at Nick (Nickelodeon) Magazine in New York. This is a pretty huge for me, not only is Nick Magazine an amazing opportunity as they are my ideal place to work at, but also this means moving to New York City with my insanely talented girlfriend *piratecore for the summer. I'm going to be spending as much time as I can at Nick but since the talks with the Manging Editor seem to be leading me to believe I'll only be in 3 days a week I want to try to maximize my time when not at Nick with talking to some galleries/companies/illustrators while I'm down there. My hope is to show some galleries my work in hopes of opening up some doors for possible shows. Talk to some companies about possible work either now or in the future. And also talk to some professional illustrators about what it's like to be an illustrator in New York, or just some general tips.

If anyone here is from the New York area and knows of some good illustration/artist spots then any information would be greatly appreciated. Any illustrators looking to help give some tips in exchange for coffee or a meet up then that would be appreciated too. Also anyone willing to offer some "how to survive in New York City" tips so I can survive my co-op would be great in my books.

Anyways, that's the big news for now. On a smaller note, I was elected President of my college program's illustration committee yesterday. This means co-ordinating things like fund raising and organizing the end of the year show. I take it as a huge compliment that the people in my program nominated/voted for me and I hope we can have a kick ass show.

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ps. my website is up if you haven't seen it yet [link]

Current Quote:
"If I understood what was going on it wouldn't be HALF as fun!"



I just wanted to toss out a couple points of interest I noticed from the movie. I will try to keep this relatively spoiler free so it's nothing you wouldn't already know if you have already seen the trailers. With that said, I highly recommend this movie for the reasons below.

if you want to go into the movie fully fresh then don't read below.

so I have to say the movie Golden Compass is a really worth while film. I haven't read the books because having heard about the movie a year ago I stayed away from the books knowing full well that movie adaptations rarely live up to their book counterparts. With that said I will definitely be reading my set as soon as possible.

To me the most interesting thing about the whole movie is the main characters lack of extreme power. In most modern fantasy/scifi stories the main character is special because they are either powerful or have been granted access to something powerful. Harry Potter, Avatar, Star Wars, Spider-man, Lord of the rings, etc, all follow stories about someone who has extreme power or in the case of LotR the character is granted access to something (usually a weapon) of great power. But that is not the case with golden compass. More then once in the movie when the shit was about to go down I was waiting for the main character to whip out the compass and start blasting people away only to remember that the compass can't actually do any of that. Even then you would expect the compass to give important battle information like weaknesses or tell you how to escape from a bad situation but it doesn't. The main character simply uses the compass to gather simple background knowledge of her foe and uses her keen mind to put together a battle strategy to win the day.
That brings me to another really interesting point. The main character is a strong female lead that doesn't have to rely on stereotypically male traits to fit the role. She isn't Keira Knightly in pirates who has to dress like a man, fight like a man, and in general act like a man to be a "strong female role model", instead the character sticks very much with what you would expect a young woman to be but uses her strengths to win the day.

all and all I was very impressed with this movie and urge anyone who actually read all this to check it out (and comment your opinions).

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ps. my website is up if you haven't seen it yet [link]